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Windows 7: Disk - Clean and Clean All with Diskpart Command

RAW indicates that it's not finished yet since it should say "Unallocated Space" instead.

Since you are doing this from a program, then it could take longer since it may do more write passes. Plus, it will take longer via a USB connection since it is slower than a internal SATA or external eSATA connection.

Is the drive's activity light still on or blinking?

If you look at the "Current Sector" area in the progress dialog box, is the sector count increasing on the left side to indicate that it is actually still running?

It's blinking like when it was with the interrupted clean all. And yeah the "Current Sector" is increasing.

I guess interrupting the previous clean didn't damage anything right? Because I think the command window actually had a blinking "_", I just interpreted it wrong. The HDD was already empty and all.

Just don't understand where those 118MB after formating the unallocated space came from.

That was the clean all as I said. Full format should be somewhat faster.
USB 2.0 - thanks for noting.

PS. Please check some earlier posts of someone waiting 11 hours. It's perfectly normal for USB externals. I wanted to register that for anyone like me afraid something is wrong...

PPS. Still before the full format, the clean all again strangely only lasted for 11 hours. Nothing was done between both (clean all) passes. Then the full format also took 11 hours.
A couple things about my earlier wrong assumption. Either Format and Diskpart, actually almost anything is under very strict bandwidth limits - all of us know it, about 20MB per second on USB 2.o; and not as much known the fact that the full format also writes zeros since Vista.
Any comment on the 3 hours difference between both clean all passes is much appreciated.

Hey guys, the diskpart "clean all" command used to zero everything out within 3hours of my normal WD Black 1TB. But after the last clean install which is half a year ago, the "clean all" command took more than 10hours.

Chkdsk found some bad sectors and fixed it, SFC found nothing, & during a month ago, I used WD HD Diag and found some errors in my hard disk. Apparently, it showed me an error and I looked it up on the net & I found the only way to fix it was to RMA it. But I lost my receipt & not sure about it whether I can RMA it without the receipt though. ):

Is it possible to fix the drive without RMA-ing it? Is it possible that the failing hard disk would be the issue for the slow "clean all" diskpart command?

That was the clean all as I said. Full format should be somewhat faster.
USB 2.0 - thanks for noting.

PS. Please check some earlier posts of someone waiting 11 hours. It's perfectly normal for USB externals. I wanted to register that for anyone like me afraid something is wrong...

PPS. Still before the full format, the clean all again strangely only lasted for 11 hours. Nothing was done between both (clean all) passes. Then the full format also took 11 hours.
A couple things about my earlier wrong assumption. Either Format and Diskpart, actually almost anything is under very strict bandwidth limits - all of us know it, about 20MB per second on USB 2.o; and not as much known the fact that the full format also writes zeros since Vista.
Any comment on the 3 hours difference between both clean all passes is much appreciated.

Hello 0770,

The time it takes to complete a "Clean all" command could vary depending on many different factors that each of those could also vary each time you run the command. For example, varying bandwidth, cpu usage, memory usage, drive errors (ex: bad sectors), how the drive is connected (SATA, USB 2.0, USB 1.0, eSATA) etc......

It's almost impossible to predict an exact time unitl completion due to this, but at least you have an average time now.

Hey guys, the diskpart "clean all" command used to zero everything out within 3hours of my normal WD Black 1TB. But after the last clean install which is half a year ago, the "clean all" command took more than 10hours.

Chkdsk found some bad sectors and fixed it, SFC found nothing, & during a month ago, I used WD HD Diag and found some errors in my hard disk. Apparently, it showed me an error and I looked it up on the net & I found the only way to fix it was to RMA it. But I lost my receipt & not sure about it whether I can RMA it without the receipt though. ):

Is it possible to fix the drive without RMA-ing it? Is it possible that the failing hard disk would be the issue for the slow "clean all" diskpart command?

Thanks for your time.

Hello Xplicit,

Yes, a failing HDD would slow it down quite a bit. In fact running a "Clean all" command on a failing HDD could cause the HDD to completely fail faster due to the high activity on the HDD the command uses.

As for your receipt, if you purchased the HDD from a online retailer, then you might be able to go back to that online retailer, log in, view your order history, and hopefully find and print out a copy of the order's invoice as a receipt.

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